While there are people who would never consider going to the beach for Thanksgiving, our North Carolina beaches get many visitors.

Somehow things seem to slow down here at the coast as the holidays approach. We locals slide into our late fall routines and our visitors seem to enjoy the unhurried way holidays play out here on the coast. It is all part of the quiet small town life that is the essence of Carteret County.

You do not have to be a visitor to enjoy the beach around Thanksgiving. Even in a year like 2014, when the first cold weather arrived a little earlier than normal, the beach is not off limits. You can usually find people on the beach in November and December. Sometimes even January provides us some great beach days.

Our seasonal reversal when the beach area becomes consistently warmer than the mainland has yet to arrive. That being the case, figuring out what to wear on a late November beach hike was the biggest challenge besides actually finding a nice day for a hike in this strangely cool November.

Since our unusually cold weather around the third week of November, our weather has been working its way back towards more normal temperatures. Sunday, November 30, appears to mark the beginning of some mostly normal weather with high temperatures in the mid sixties and low temperatures in the mid forties.

I took advantage of November 30, the warm Sunday afternoon that ended the month, and headed over to Emerald Isle for my beach hike. It was sixty-one Fahrenheit when I left our home near the White Oak River. I watched my car thermometer and it bounced to 62F going over Bogue Sound but fell back to 61F by the time I parked at the Station St. parking lot. The whole trip only took about ten minutes since there is little if any traffic this time of year.

My normal hike at the beach is about two miles. It often depends on what looks interesting and what else I have planned. I stuck to my two mile hike this Sunday because I hoped to get back home for a quick boat ride on the White Oak River.

A close second is the elevation of the sand by the beach vehicle access ramp at the end of Inlet Drive by Bogue Court. The height of the sand just keeps growing in this area. Considering that seven years ago there was no sand there, it is even more impressive. If you are down on the lower portions of the beach, new dunes growing make it impossible to see what remains of Coast Guard Channel.

The beach was very peaceful with only a handful of trucks and just a few visitors walking. There were two guys kite surfing over by the Point, but I did not see a single boat in the Inlet. There was a friendly brown pelican, some sanderlings, and a couple of rudy turnstones.

I solved my clothing dilemma by wearing a swim suit, long-sleeved t-shirt and a light nylon windbreaker. I might have gotten by with just the t-shirt but as soon as the sun starts dropping things cool off quickly at the Point. There were places the windbreaker felt good. I did see some tracks of someone who had walked the beach barefooted earlier in the day.

My walk lasted less than an hour so I was off the beach before four PM and headed home to take advantage of the last light. As the sun started dipping below the pine trees, I headed out our inlet, Raymond’s Gut. I planned a short run to test our boat since we just put it back at our dock after some repairs.

Everything worked fine, but the water temperature in the river was down under 53F which I think is considerably colder than last year at the same time. Water that cold usually means there are no fish lurking on my favorite oyster rocks. There were no clouds in the sky so waiting around for a sunset did not make a lot of sense. I headed home knowing my wife had some tasty Senate Navy Bean Soup with Kale waiting for me.

We also send out an almost monthly newsletter. Our most recent newsletter was sent out on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It is available here on the web. You can read our October newsletter online at this link.

We will be sending out our next newsletter the week just before Christmas.

There are lots of things perfectly normal and even very nice about the picture that adorns this post. The clear skies, the blue waters, and the golden fall colors of the marsh are all treats we count on here along the southern coast of North Carolina

However, what you cannot tell from the picture is the air temperature which had dropped to 23F on the morning of November 19, 2014, when my camera captured the image. That cold walk on the boardwalk was a frigid reminder of the power of nature. Even those of us living by the water know that while it is unusual, arctic air can travel all the way to our coastal paradise along the North Carolina coast even in the fall months.

With a November average high temperature of around 65F and an average low temperature of 45F, our November 18-19 weather this year has come as something of a shock. Our high temperature on November 18, 2014, was 44F and our low the next morning was 24F. The high on November 19, was 42F.

While these temperatures might seem like a heat wave to some friends to the north, they are very cold to us and not even typical of our winter temperatures. Our average high in January is 50F and the average low is 33F. Our first fall here back in 2006 I managed to get back in shorts at the end of November.

Usually we have plenty of November beach days and lots of time to look for fish in my watery backyard. This year it has been a little harder to enjoy the water as much and while it would be easy to blame the weather, I have to shoulder some of the blame myself since I have been busier at work. However, it is harder to get on the water when we are missing those long stretches of don’t pinch me weather. However, we are accustomed to periods of challenging weather with lots of great weather mixed in to keep us happy.

We did have a great early November harvest of beans and broccoli. In fact we are still eating broccoli that we grew and some that came from a neighbor. To lessen the impact of the unusual cold, I built a frame to cover my lettuce and chard and keep it warm with a light bulb. We should have three or four heads of Romaine lettuce in the next couple of weeks. We have more lots more tiny lettuce seedlings growing in a raised bed. If we are lucky we will get some nice weather in December and we might harvest lettuce in January.

Gardening in December is something of a tradition for us. This is a link to a January 13, 2013, picture of lettuce growing in our garden so our efforts to harvest January lettuce are not signs of insanity. Hopefully we will be even more successful this year than we were in 2013. The polar vortex got us last year, but I am ready my light bulb this year. We also have kale and Swiss Chard growing and expect to enjoy them into the new year. They are doing very well. Last year we also harvested a few rutabagas in January. Our crop this year looks even better.

This picture is of my homemade sourdough bread with some of our home grown lettuce. It made for a delicious tuna fish sandwich especially when accompanied by some of my wife’s homemade chicken noodle soup. It is hard to complain about the weather when you are enjoying delicious food inspired by the cold weather.

We also send out an almost monthly newsletter. Our most recent newsletter was sent out on October 8. You can read it online at this link. We will be sending out our next newsletter next week just before Thanksgiving.

We have lived in some spots that transition early to winter. At our home in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, where we lived during the seventies and early eighties, the ground was often white by the first week in November.

It was white when we moved there in November of 1974 and the snow never left that year until May. I was not surprised when I recently got some snow pictures from friends who still live near our old Tay Ridge Angus farm. They were taken on November 3, 2014. Tay Creek was not the only place that winter came early in our lives. Even our home in the mountains of Southwest Virginia got snow before Thanksgiving in 1989. The snow stayed on the ground until Christmas that year.

Still November is a time of change. The beautiful sunsets out on our river often have a crispness that we do not see earlier in the fall. I usually have to pull out my blue jeans a few times during November. Sometimes we even have to turn on the heat as we did this first weekend of November 2014. Fortunately we have not had a frost and we have tomatoes and beans growing in our garden. Water temperatures which can be in the upper seventies in September often plummet to the sixties in early November. That is great for those of who enjoy fishing and sometime get seduced by the water around us.

November usually marks the time when we no longer worry about hurricanes as much. We can have periods of very quiet weather only to watch Nor’easters spin up off our coast and deliver some of the those early snows up north.

We often get to enjoy our last fishing trips out to the big water in November. However, as November slides away from us, the time comes to start enjoying the quiet waters near home. November takes us from that weather which is good enough to bottle to weather which actually requires some outerwear to enjoy.

Fortunately winter takes a while to find us and we usually have a gentle rather than an abrupt transformation. Some years we almost escape it, but there are years like 2014 when even our little paradise gets frozen. We do usually get some January beach days and by the end of February the power of the North Carolina sunshine almost always gives us an early taste of spring.

Still November marks the time when even the most rugged of our visitors start thinking about heading home. By December, most of the people here are full time residents or those looking for peaceful waters and an escape from the madness of the holidays in the city. Sometime before December we have a seasonal reversal when the beach areas are warmer than the mainland where we live. By spring that flips again and the beach areas are cooler than the mainland. It all depends on the water and the riddle of our coastal weather.

We also send out an almost monthly newsletter. Our most recent newsletter was sent out on October 8. You can read it online at this link. We will be sending out our next newsletter just before Thanksgiving.